Johnson staggers from crisis to crisis unable to lead a team that can deliver, clutching at straws in the wind, then throwing them under a bus when things go wrong. Owl expects casualties this week.

We can’t hit Covid booster jabs target, warn NHS bosses

Chris Smyth, Oliver Wright www.thetimes.co.uk 

Boris Johnson’s goal of giving everyone a booster jab by the end of the year is unlikely to be met, NHS leaders warned as huge queues formed outside vaccine centres.

Waits of up to five hours were reported at some clinics and the central booking website repeatedly crashed as it struggled to keep up with demand.

The UK Health Security Agency estimated that 200,000 people were infected with Omicron today, far more than previously known to have caught Covid-19 in a single day and suggesting that the variant has already outpaced Delta. The prime minister launched an appeal for vaccine volunteers to help the NHS “hit warp speed” on boosters. Councils, fire brigades and police have been asked to offer up any staff trained in delivering jabs.

Vaccination centres were told last night to be ready to run 24 hours a day and through Christmas as ministers insisted that boosters take precedence over routine care. Hospitals and GP surgeries were ordered to redeploy staff to support what Amanda Pritchard, head of NHS England, called “an immediate, all-out drive” on boosters.

Deliveries of vaccine doses to units will be doubled today and centres were told to put up tents and portable buildings to get through as many jabs as possible. Omicron is more transmissible than previous variants and better at evading vaccine protection. Data last week showed two doses offered minimal protection against the strain but a third jab could be up to 75 per cent effective against symptomatic infection.

Despite the vaccine mobilisation, NHS leaders fear they are being “set up to fail” by Johnson’s promise of a million jabs a day and a goal of offering all adults a booster by the end of the month. They said the booster programme may not be finished until well into the new year.

There were 397,532 boosters reported yesterday and the rolling average now stands at 425,869, about half the record daily total of 844,285 in March. It means 18 million people in England are yet to have a third jab. Johnson acknowledged that to hit his target “we’ll have to attain a pace and a number of daily booster doses that will exceed anything that we’ve done before”.

After Johnson made a televised commitment on Sunday night that all adults in England “will have the chance to get their booster before the new year”, NHS leaders clarified that they were not promising to jab all remaining adults in the next two and a half weeks.

They said the health service can only commit to offering people the chance to make appointments by the end of the year, with large numbers of jabs expected to be administered in January. Some may even run into February if people are slow in coming forward.

Javid suggested the target would be met if people had received a text from the NHS before New Year’s Eve, insisting he could not make promises about how many people would be vaccinated.

Challenged in the Commons on when boosters would be completed, Javid said: “There’s a distinction between the NHS being able to offer an individual a jab, so they might receive an email or text saying ‘please come forward’ … but it does take that individual to come forward.” Although 390,000 people booked online yesterday, the NHS website crashed repeatedly. People have been warned they face long waits if they do not book.

NHS chiefs believe it is feasible to reach five million jabs a week, a million more than the programme’s best week so far, but have resisted giving firm commitments. One senior NHS source said the vaccine target would be harder than adapting to coronavirus in March last year or dealing with January’s peak in admissions, expressing irritation at Johnson for not acknowledging this.

Ministers “have a duty to set realistic expectations so they don’t set up the public services they lead to fail”, they said, likening the pledge to Johnson’s promise last year of a “world beating” test and trace service that would avoid the need for further restrictions.

They added that there was also “a real question of how quickly the required increase can happen”, saying it would take several days even to know what was feasible given workforce shortages.

But the source also said that the NHS was treating the booster programme as an emergency akin to the arrival of Covid-19 itself, saying “I don’t feel ready to say a million a day by Christmas is ludicrous. It might just happen”.

A Downing Street source said Johnson knew he had set an “ambitious” target but stressed that “no one is going to get the blame if that doesn’t happen”.

As East Devon MP Simon Jupp goes full ostrich in the face of the Omicron wave, my new column for the Midweek Herald and Sidmouth Herald challenges the sheer irresponsibility of his and other Tories’ opposition to even the minimal Plan B proposed by the government:

seatonmatters.org 

“If the rapidly escalating Omicron wave of Covid puts the country into some kind of lockdown by New Year, please remember to blame the knee-jerk responses of backbench Tories like Simon Jupp as well as the weakness of Boris Johnson and his action plan. 

Within hours the East Devon MP tweeted, ‘I don’t support Plan B. … I won’t vote for these measures.’ Perhaps Mr Jupp would like pop down to the RD&E to explain in person to patients queuing in ambulances? To the ambulance staff, prevented from doing their job and getting to other patients on time? To those whose operations have been postponed over and over again, now looking at even longer waits? To exhausted hospital staff, now facing a new surge of Covid patients on top of everything else? To those whose relatives have died because of delayed treatment?

I’m sure that Mr Jupp will be able to convince them that because ‘working from home won’t help our social or economic recovery’, as he claimed on Twitter, he is right to try to stop this proven method of slowing infections. Mind you, if they don’t agree with him, and take to Twitter themselves to express their views, they’ll find that Mr Jupp has blocked them from replying to him.

Mr Jupp believes that ‘Plan B will cost jobs in many sectors, including hospitality’. He doesn’t even seem to have read the small print, which excludes pubs and restaurants from the requirement to wear masks. In fact, it’s almost certain that limited protective measures like working from home and masking in shops and public transport – which might have been sufficient to reduce the high levels of infection that we already had before Omicron hit – will not now be enough. This weak, discredited government, overly scared of backbenchers like Mr Jupp, is setting itself up for another massive U-turn by yet again doing too little and too late.

There is no excuse for Mr Jupp’s ignorance. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but he doesn’t seem to be looking at the evidence, or learning from experience. Even after three difficult lockdowns, he still hasn’t grasped that letting the virus rip is only a recipe for another lockdown down the line. He hasn’t understood that, far from blocking economic recovery, measures like home-working, mask-wearing and requiring people to be vaccinated or tested before entering public spaces are the only way to let normal economic life carry on in a pandemic.

Sadly, even before Omicron, the government’s protective measures were too little. It would not have harmed the economy to require masks and install ventilation filters in schools – it would have protected education. But by refusing to slow the schools epidemic this autumn, the government ensured that the UK continued to have a very high level of Covid transmission, feeding through into consistently high levels of hospitalisations and deaths. Where was Mr Jupp’s protest about that?

It’s not just that our hypocritical prime minister has been listening to his ill-informed backbenchers. They in turn are in thrall to the anti-vax warriors, the anti-maskers and the people who call entry requirements ‘vaccine passports’, which Mr Jupp says are ‘divisive and discriminatory’. So, we should simply allow unprotected and potentially infected people into every crowded space? 

When more than 1 person in 40 in East Devon has Covid – more in younger age groups – this is a recipe for disaster. I have news for Mr Jupp. With our boosters, many of us were just beginning to feel safer, and going again into the very pubs and restaurants which seem to be the only part of our local economy that he cares about. But unless the government halts the Omicron wave, those who care about their health and the state of the NHS will vote with their feet once more. Protect our health – or you won’t have an economic recovery to talk about.”

Does Simon know the difference between social housing and so-called “affordable” housing (many don’t) – Owl?

This is what Cornwall’s temporary housing “pods” look like:

MP Jupp would happily live in ‘pod’

Ollie Heptinstall, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk

Eco-friendly modular homes to be built by Mid Devon District Council for social housing have been described as ‘awesome’ by a Devon MP.

An initial 14 properties, designed to be ultra-low to net-zero carbon with low running costs, are planned for sites in Tiverton and Cullompton in collaboration with producer Zed Pods. They will all be classed as ‘affordable’ at 80 per cent of market rates.

“Awesome” homes “don’t fill developers’ pockets”

The modular units are factory-made before being transported to site. The company claims they are “built to higher standards than conventional houses” and are “super insulated,” with triple-glazing and solar panels.

Applications are in for eight such apartments at Shapland Place in Tiverton and six more at Cullompton’s St. Andrews Estate. Mid Devon District Council planners will have to decide whether to approve them.

East Devon MP Simon Jupp cited Mid Devon’s plans for the modular homes as an innovative way of providing much-needed housing in Devon “that don’t basically fill the pockets of developers.”

Speaking to the BBC’s Politics South West, he said: “I’ve been inside several modular homes. They’re awesome. I would very happily live in one and they’re a cheaper way…. to actually provide affordable housing on both rent and when you come to buy it.”

Mr Jupp, a Conservative MP since 2019, added they are “a much cheaper of producing and building a house. Bricks and mortar takes time and costs money. Modular housing is a heck of a lot cheaper, and the government is actually looking at ways to support modular housing across the country.”

Speaking about them in the summer, Councillor Bob Evans (Conservative, Lower Culm), Mid Devon’s cabinet member for housing said: “We are committed to providing more social housing across the district and these homes will provide this as well as help us strive towards our goal of being carbon-neutral by 2030.”

The NHS was put on a crisis footing tonight as hospitals in England were told to discharge as many patients as possible while estimated daily Omicron cases hit 200,000 and the variant claimed its first life in the UK.

Rowena Mason www.theguardian.com 

Boris Johnson is braced for his biggest rebellion as prime minister on Tuesday, with about 80 Tory MPs confirmed to be preparing to vote against measures on working from home, Covid passports and more mask wearing. He will have to rely on Labour support for the votes to pass.

Amid a scramble for tests and booster jabs, the country’s doctors called for further restrictions to be imposed to stem the rise in cases and Downing Street did not rule out fresh measures.

In a letter to hospitals, NHS England chiefs said patients who could be discharged to care homes, hospices, their own homes or hotels before Christmas to free up beds, should be. The letter from NHS England’s chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, and medical director Prof Stephen Powis said the service was facing a level 4 “national incident”.

Hotels are already being turned into temporary care facilities staffed with workers flown in from Spain and Greece to relieve rising pressure on NHS hospital beds.

Hospitals and GPs have also been told to scale back normal services and limit care to those needing urgent attention so that NHS staff can be freed up to deliver boosters. Hospitals will undertake fewer non-urgent operations, but “highest clinical priority patients”, including people with cancer and those who have been waiting a long time, will be given priority.

They have also been told to take ambulance-borne patients into A&E more quickly so that paramedics can get back on the road to answer more 999 calls, speed up efforts to bring in nurses from overseas to help tackle the NHS’s lack of staff, and send as many patients as possible for surgery at private hospitals.

A campaign to give boosters to more than 1 million people a day got under way, prompting the NHS website to crash and people to queue in the street for up to five hours for their jabs.

But the British Medical Association said the vaccination campaign would not be enough to stop the spread of Omicron, with one in four still not eligible for a booster. They called for a return to face masks in pubs and restaurants, 2-metre social distancing indoors, limits on public gatherings, legal requirements for ventilation in schools and other settings, more rapid testing and advice to wear FFP2 masks.

No 10 insisted that the booster campaign was its immediate priority, with a senior government source describing the main strategy as “keep on jabbing”. But Boris Johnson refused to rule out tougher restrictions if necessary to maintain public health. No 10 said all options were still on the table, leaving open the possibility of closing schools “as a last resort” and bringing in curbs without consulting MPs “in extremis”.

Addressing MPs, Sajid Javid revealed there may now be as many 200,000 Omicron infections a day. He said around 20% of confirmed cases in England had been identified as the Omicron variant, and warned of “difficult weeks ahead”. In London, the centre of the Omicron outbreak, it accounted for over 44% of cases and was expected to become the dominant form within 48 hours, the health secretary said.

He said Covid passports would be toughened to require people to have a booster or recent lateral flow test (LFT) in the new year, risking inflaming Tory backbench anger against restrictions ahead of Commons votes on “plan B” restrictions.

Labour backed the government’s booster campaign and stopped short of calling for any new restrictions, with Keir Starmer saying it was Labour’s “patriotic duty” to vote for plan B.

The prime minister confirmed the first death of a patient with Omicron and 10 people hospitalised with the variant, saying people needed to “set aside” the idea that the variant was mild.

Meanwhile, head teachers warned of “chaos” in schools, with high levels of staff and pupil absences and reports that some parents were planning to keep children home to avoid the virus before Christmas.

On the first day of the new vaccine campaign, 386,000 people in England are understood to have booked booster jabs – almost 50,000 an hour. But there was confusion over whether all eligible over-18s would be able to get a booster by the end of the year, with No 10 insisting they would, while the NHS cast doubt on the goal. Javid suggested the target was to “offer” rather than deliver the boosters.

Johnson and Pritchard launched a joint plea for the public to volunteer in vaccination centres, calling for tens of thousands of people to act as unpaid stewards and thousands to sign up as paid vaccinators. It is understood No 10 will also launch a new effort to reach the unvaccinated, using a publicity campaign potentially involving faith leaders and celebrities.

On Monday people trying to get LFTs were told they were unavailable despite a new requirement for Covid contacts to take them daily for a week.

The call from the BMA for tougher restrictions echoed warnings from scientists that vaccination alone would not be able to stop Omicron causing a dangerous second wave. Leaked documents from the UK Health and Security Agency showed on Friday that public health officials believe there should be “stringent national measures” by 18 December at the latest, with sources saying plan B will not be enough.

The BMA, which represents 150,000 doctors, is the first major medical organisation to call for stricter measures. Dr Chaand Nagpaul, BMA council chair, said: “Despite describing the current situation as an ‘emergency’ with a ‘tidal wave’ of infections on the horizon, the government’s response, relying entirely on the vaccine booster programme, is missing the wider measures required to control the spread of Omicron, including protecting millions of people who will not be eligible for the booster programme by the end of December.”

Chris Hopson, the NHS Providers chief executive, said the new guidance “gives an indication of what a monumental effort this will be”.

The former chair of the South African ministerial advisory committee on Covid-19, Prof Salim Karim, told BBC News early data from South Africa looked good.

“In the past three waves, about two out of every three patients admitted were cases of severe disease, and right now we have only one out of four cases that is severe.”

However, it is important to note that South Africa has a younger population than the UK.

No 10 has been resistant to new measures before Christmas but is planning to review the situation on 18 December.

Wouldn’t it be a great idea to have community hospitals as “half way” accommodation … oh wait …

Robert Booth www.theguardian.com 

Hotels are being turned into temporary care facilities staffed with workers flown in from Spain and Greece to relieve rising pressure on NHS hospital beds.

Three hotels in the south of England are being used, including one in Plymouth into which 30 hospital patients have been discharged to be looked after by live-in carers. It is understood that the staff are staying on upper floors while patients are below.

At least three other health authorities are considering the move, which is partly driven by the severe shortage of domiciliary care workers able to look after people in their own homes, according to Anne-Marie Perry, chief executive of Abicare, a home care company contracted to set up the facilities. She said they were for people who are ready to be discharged to their homes but couldn’t be because care packages were not available.

“The hospitals are on their knees and we are being contacted fairly regularly by clinical commission groups,” said Perry. “The problem Plymouth have is there is not enough domiciliary care provision, so that’s one of the reasons why they can’t discharge patients.”

A similar tactic was used at the start of the pandemic in spring 2020, when hotels were used to help discharge tens of thousands of hospital patients in anticipation of hospitals being filled to breaking point with Covid cases. It happened again in some places in January this year.

Now, with similar warnings that the NHS faces being overwhelmed by the Omicron variant, Abicare said it has converted whole floors of hotels, and has recruited British nationals living in Greece and Spain, as well as some from the north of England, to staff them in a shift pattern of three weeks on and three weeks off.

On Monday, NHS Providers said bed occupancy in hospitals was at 94%–96%, and its chief executive, Chris Hopson, said on Sunday that the shortage of social care staff was a big driver of delayed discharges, with more than 10,000 beds last week occupied by medically fit patients.

Perry said the cost of care – around £300 a night – was well under half that of an NHS bed, but the move is likely to raise questions about levels of care, as hotels are not equipped with sluice rooms and other facilities normally available in care homes.

Jane Townson, the chief executive of the Homecare Association, described the move as “unacceptable” and said it “feels like [people] being warehoused”. She called for greater funding to boost the workforce that helps people in their own home.

Nadra Ahmed, executive chairman of the National Care Association, said she was shocked by the arrangement because hotels were not configured to deliver care and questioned the safety and wellbeing of residents if they need urgent medical assistance.

“Is home care so broken that we can’t support people in their own homes where they need to be?” she said. “This is another sticking plaster and the person being moved into the hotel is the person being let down.”

Abicare said it had been unable to find live-in care workers based in the UK so it was using expats. But has warned that with more health authorities approaching it to set up hotel facilities in the new year, it may not be able to find staff to meet much greater demand.

In January, NHS England issued guidance about using hotels for discharges which said it “should only be used as a short-term measure (days, rather than weeks) for the specific purpose of reducing length of stay for people in hospital and ensuring they are discharged when they no longer meet the ‘criteria to reside’ in a hospital.”

Abicare said it has previously worked with Holiday Inn and Best Western hotel groups. A spokesperson for NHS Devon clinical commissioning group said: “Thirty-two beds are currently available to support people who would be delayed in hospital waiting for support at home. Feedback from patients has been excellent and since March 2020 this has saved several thousand hospital bed days. This has freed beds for people who needed inpatient care in a hospital setting.”

NHS England has been approached for comment.

“Drinks, nibbles, games”: three words delivered in a studiously measured tone that have added to serious stress headaches at the heart of government and sparked nagging rumours of the prime minister’s exit.

Alexandra Topping www.theguardian.com 

The BBC’s Ros Atkins, who delivered the deadpan words in a video explainer of the “partygate” scandal that went viral, has become an unlikely star of the festive saga. Admirers from across the political divide – from Piers Morgan to James O’Brien – have praised his commitment to the cold, hard presentation of facts, while he has been credited with creating a “whole new genre of reporting”.

In a series of short explainers, the BBC News Channel’s Outside Source presenter has repeatedly skewered the Boris Johnson administration, while never coming within striking distance of seeming to have an opinion.

“Forensic, measured, factual, brilliant,” wrote veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil after Atkins’ explainer on 6 December. Two days later Morgan tweeted: “Ros once again brilliantly illustrating that the best journalism is often the simplest: just damn people with cool, calm, collected & utterly irrefutable facts.”

The first video on the Christmas parties was posted on 2 December, two days after the story broke, and two more have followed. In nine days the 3-4 minute clips – long for viral videos – have been watched over 11m times, far more than any other digital news series, with insiders in the BBC admitting that their popularity has confounded expectations about the desires of online news consumers.

Watch them here

The 47-year-old is no hotshot newcomer. He has been at the BBC for 20 years, joining the corporation weeks after 9/11. He started out as a producer on Simon Mayo’s 5 live show, before becoming a presenter on the BBC World Service in 2004.

Atkins, a former DJ who ran a club night in Brixton in the 2000s and performed at Womad, was part of the team that launched Outside Source, a daily show that curates news from wires, video feeds and social media on the News Channel and BBC World News, in 2014.

His explainers started with coverage of the Australia bush fires in late 2019, and earlier this year the BBC launched Ros Atkins On, promising 10 minutes of his “straight-talking style of analysis and explanation” on the biggest issues of the day on iPlayer, BBC Breakfast and the BBC’s news website.

His films, covering the heatwaves in the States and the Belarus migrant crisis as well as domestic political issues, “explain the background and context to current events in a scrupulously impartial, accessible way”, said Jamie Angus, senior controller, news output and commissioning, at BBC News. “He’s made this type of explainer his own, and it’s proved wildly popular with audiences across the world, and very shareable on social media,” he said.

The explainers, very much seen as Atkins’ baby, were created in an attempt to make live TV also work as an on-demand digital product, with one former BBC news executive describing their style as “assertive impartiality”.

“Ros is just brilliant at this,” the executive said. “If you look at what he’s done, it’s stripped down ‘this is what happened’ in three minutes flat – there’s no florid tedious language, there’s no self indulgence to it.”

Atkins’ unflinching presentation manages to get the viewer to raise an eyebrow through facts alone, said the former executive. “I think sometimes the BBC mistakes impartiality for sucking the life out of something. But Ros is human and has a personality, while never making it about him, or leaving himself open to accusations of bias.”

Colleagues say Atkins, who is married with two teenagers, is dedicated, rehearsing lines and tweaking scripts until he is sure they will have the greatest impact. One former colleague compared his approach to news to his love of squash. “He makes things look effortless but they’re not effortless. Just like being a very good squash player takes years of practice, being a really good TV craftsman takes a long time too – he works bloody hard to make it spot on.”

[The “BBC Outside Source” series of short explainers are well worth looking at – Owl]